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Gibney Up Close
REVIEWS | Di Cecilia Whalen

Gibney Up Close

At the end of Yin Yue's “A Measurable Existence” on June 15, Marla Phelan and Kevin Pajarillaga walked stoically forward and back, one downstage and one upstage, standing in a glow of orange lighting. The piece is a feat of clever partnering and energetic contemporary phrase work that is intricate and challenging. In New York Live Arts' intimate space, we can see even the beads of sweat that drip off of the dancers' chins. Performing up close can be risky; but the Gibney dancers up close are perhaps even more remarkable than afar, as we witness in immediacy their precision,...

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Serious Play
REVIEWS | Di Gracia Haby

Serious Play

Remember me. Remember me. The comfort that floats behind the heartache of Henry Purcell’s Lament from “Dido and Aeneas,” When I am laid in the earth: remember me.  Be now, in the present, remember me. So begins “Kunstkamer,” originally commissioned in 2019 for the 60th anniversary of Netherlands Dans Theater, and presented for the first time outside of the Netherlands by the Australian Ballet.

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Giselle Retold
REVIEWS | Di Faye Arthurs

Giselle Retold

I have often wondered why few troupes revive the classic story ballets the way Orson Welles restaged Shakespeare—as when he boldly set “Macbeth” in Haiti, or when he put an anti-fascist spin on “Julius Caesar” right on the cusp of WWII. The answer probably lies in funding difficulties: ballet is a hard enough sell that people don’t like to mess with the sacred cash cows. Against the odds, the English National Ballet’s 2016 production of “Giselle,” which had its NY premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, dares to be timely. Of all the narrative stalwarts, “Giselle”—which depicts...

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Sevillana
REVIEWS | Di Marina Harss

Sevillana

It’s been three years since American Ballet Theatre last stepped onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, three years since it rolled out its well-worn productions of evening-length story ballets. The Met season is a kind of hit parade, and the current run is no different: It begins with the festive pseudo-Spanish extravaganza “Don Quixote” and ends with Kenneth MacMillan’s tear-jerker “Romeo and Juliet.” With, in the middle, no less than twelve performances of “Swan Lake.” The exceptions to this succession of super-familiar works are Ratmansky’s new “Of Love and Rage,” which opens next week, and a mixed bill...

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Twinkle Twinkle, Little Stars
REVIEWS | Di Faye Arthurs

Twinkle Twinkle, Little Stars

It’s hard to explain the School of American Ballet’s annual Workshop performances to outsiders. Workshop is a year-end ballet recital, but when the students’ families gather in the lobby afterwards to shower their children with flowers and tell them that they were wonderful—and just like real ballerinas—they are speaking the truth. This year, the advanced levels at SAB danced the Fourth Movement and Finale from George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” a feat that many professional companies cannot pull off. It is a technically demanding piece that requires at least forty bodies, including twelve men who can do triple pirouettes. Many...

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Beyond the End
REVIEWS | Di Rachel Howard

Beyond the End

In the chaotic, dirty heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, in a fuchsia building that once housed a porn palace, stands a venue named CounterPulse. I’m always curious what’s going on at CounterPulse because the place seems to welcome subversion with an edge of sexiness, because it prioritizes racial equity in a way that goes way beyond lip service, and because you never know when you’re going to discover something mind-blowing there. That all proved true again in early June, when I was lured to the culminating performances of CounterPulse’s ARC Edge residency by Audrey Johnson, a beguiling dancer in...

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Forget Me Not
REVIEWS | Di Veronica Posth

Forget Me Not

Pina Bausch’s penultimate work, “Sweet Mambo” premiered in 2008, following its counterpart “Bamboo Blues.” The two pieces were created in an attempt to explore how a single starting point—identical set design—could lead to two distinct pieces, developed by two different casts. “Sweet Mambo” was recently reconstructed by Alan Lucien Øyen, and performed in Wuppertal by the original cast, with the exception of Naomi Brito, company member since 2020/21, who danced the role originated by Regina Advento.

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Body Language
REVIEWS | Di Karen Hildebrand

Body Language

From the moment Doug Varone’s “Somewhere” opens on the figure of Hollis Bartlett leaning into a lateral arabesque, and we hear the sound of a certain unmistakable finger snapping, it’s clear that the GPS for this particular somewhere is the misty pre-dawn of an empty NYC tenement street in Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” During a week that celebrated 35 years of performance, Doug Varone and Dancers presented a program of four works that map the evolution of a master story teller.

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Delicate Aberrations
REVIEWS | Di Cecilia Whalen

Delicate Aberrations

When Trisha Brown's “Foray Forêt” begins, dancers look like shadows against a purple backdrop until the stage fades in to light. We see intricate, gentle, movements: slight inclines of the head, swinging arms, brief transfers of weight between the group. They are done with great precision, sometimes independently and sometimes remarkably synchronized. “Foray Forêt” was choreographed in 1990, and Brown said she was trying to tap into her subconscious to create simplified, intimate gestures. It was one collaboration of many with Brown's good friend and creative partner Robert Rauschenberg (he did the visual design and the costumes) and was recently...

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Fairies and Fireflies
REVIEWS | Di Marina Harss

Fairies and Fireflies

Is there a better way to end the spring season than with George Balanchine’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”? If so, I can’t think of it. Mendelssohn’s music, with its breathless forward drive, pulls one immediately into the story. (In this, it is reminiscent of “The Nutcracker” score.) George Balanchine’s choreography is equally transporting. From the first moment, as a flurry of tiny butterflies and fairies—beautifully-trained kids from the School of American Ballet—skitters across the stage, we are drawn into Shakespeare’s world. The spell lasts until the end of the first act, when all the characters, both human and magical, make peace...

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Moving Meditation
REVIEWS | Di Karen Hildebrand

Moving Meditation

At the hands of choreographer Stephen Petronio, a return to the stage after two years away becomes an occasion to both honor the past and contemplate the current moment. Opening night of the Stephen Petronio Company’s weeklong engagement at the Joyce Theater includes a new work, a restaging of vintage Trisha Brown, and an emotionally redeeming piece from company repertory, “Bloom,” accompanied live by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.

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Mats Ek is Back at the Paris Opera Ballet
REVIEWS | Di Candice Thompson

Mats Ek is Back at the Paris Opera Ballet

As bells sounded the theme opening Georges Bizet’s Carmen Suite, Simon Le Borgne sat slumped on an exercise ball, facing upstage, his head drooped so low he appeared in the spotlight as an almost headless Don José. Others entered, including Ida Viikinkoski as M., Don José’s betrothed. Trying to conjure him awake with sharp motions that ticked like a clock, she left him to the battalion of soldiers, lining up to serve as his firing squad. The effect was one of a bad dream, a premonition that was both the beginning and ending of Mats Ek’s “Carmen,” created for Cullberg...

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Featured Reads

REVIEWS | Rachel Howard
Starry Nights

Beneath blue California skies, manicured trees, and the occasional hum of an overhead airplane, Tamara Rojo took the Frost Amphitheater stage at Stanford University to introduce herself as the new artistic director of San Francisco Ballet.

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